Word: somberness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...long and somber Cabinet meetings last week, De Gaulle and his Cabinet wrestled with these awkward realities. At last, hot on the heels of the London announcement, Antoine Pinay proclaimed France's course. Presumably buoyed up by promises of financial underwriting from West Germany, France followed Britain's lead, made the franc, too, externally convertible. At the same time the De Gaulle government devalued the franc by an unexpected 17.5%, established a new rate of 493.7 to the dollar...
Really Faithful. Out of the swimming pools, Tammy went to New York, studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and spent two years playing in somber epics, including Mourning Becomes Electra. TV and a few other acting bits kept Tammy going until 1954, when she met and later married Canada-born Actor Christopher Plummer, now starring in Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. At the time, Tammy was working in the box office at the Westport (Conn.) Playhouse. "They fired me," she says, "because I lost them $500 giving away free passes." (The habit still afflicts her. At the Downstairs...
Taken as a theater piece, J.B. has an often stunning theatricality, notably in the first half. The spoken verse is sometimes sharp and eloquent. The circus setting, in Boris Aronson's graphically somber set, enhances both the Biblical immensities and the modern-day horror. The bearers of ill tidings to J.B.-liquored-up soldiers, flashbulb photographers, raincoated police-are peculiarly scarifying. Moreover, J.B.'s story is varied, heightened, salted, glossed by the exchanges between the Zuss of Raymond Massey and-the play's top performance-the Nickles of Christopher Plummer...
Verdi: Simon Boccanegra (Victoria de los Angeles, Tito Gobbi. Giuseppe Cam-pora, Boris Christoff; Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Gabriele Santini; Capitol-EMI, 3 LPs). Verdi constructed his stately, somber-hued monument to paternal love and loyalty midway in his career, saw it fail at the box office and later agreed with the public that it was a "monotonous and cold'' work. Nevertheless, he returned to it after 25 years and extensively revised it. Not often performed, the revised Boccanegra is a fascinating melange of early Verdian flamboyance and late Verdian depth. In this...
Discussing his visit to the Soviet Union last summer, Billington noted that one of the chief aims of leading scientists and technicians "is to get rid of the dreary, somber, Moscovite style of architecture." This is not a mere detail, he explained, but the only way "they can assert the value of human considerations...